Owsley Brown Frazier Chair in Clinical Rehabilitation Research

School of Medicine

Susan J. Harkema, Ph.D. is an associate professor in the School of Medicine’s Department of Neurological Surgery. She also serves as rehabilitation director of the Kentucky Spinal Cord Injury Research Center (KSCIRC) and the director of research at Frazier Rehab Institute.

Her research is funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Kentucky Spinal Cord and Head Injury Research Trust and the Christopher and Dana Reeve Paralysis Foundation. Her research also receives support from the Frazier Rehab Institute.

Harkema’s research is focused on understanding neural mechanisms responsible for human locomotion and the level of plasticity -- or ability to change and recover -- after neurologic injury. The primary focus of her research program is to study the neural mechanisms for human locomotion and the level of plasticity – or potential for change and development – after neurologic injury. She and her colleagues have developed an intervention called Locomotor Training that re-teaches walking by providing appropriate sensory cues that can be recognized by the neural circuitry of the spinal cord and promote better muscle patterns for walking. The results of these studies contribute to our knowledge about the fundamental mechanisms that control human locomotion and may provide strategies that can be used by physical therapists for the rehabilitation of walking for patients after neurologic injury.

Harkema has served as a reviewer for 10 scientific journals and has published more than 50 peer-reviewed papers and book chapters. She is regularly invited to speak at national and international conferences.

A graduate of Michigan State University, Harkema earned her B.S. and Ph.D. in physiology and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in neurology at the University of California, Los Angeles. After joining the faculty at UCLA in 1995 as an assistant researcher, Harkema became an assistant professor in the department of neurology and the Brain Research Institute. She joined the University of Louisville and Frazier Rehab Institute in 2005.